


Fallen Down the Rabbit Hole

by AngeNoir



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: (non-death), Alice in Wonderland References, Alice: Madness Returns - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Dark, Canonical Character Death, Delusions, Graphic Violence, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, dark!john
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 19:47:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/982904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngeNoir/pseuds/AngeNoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He wasn’t like the others; he was whole. In a way. Deranged, a bit, with a ridiculous top hat perched on top of his head. His scarf was made up of barbed wire, and he carried with him a chemists’ set with which he produced gold. One eye was bigger than the other, and bloodshot, and he trailed wailing shrieks and screams and cries behind him.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>So writes John of Sherlock Holmes, the madman in a hat that stalked his waking dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fallen Down the Rabbit Hole

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lifeofamarriedfangirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeofamarriedfangirl/gifts).



> A fill for lifeofamarriedfangirl:
> 
> "What I'm aiming for is a bit of a dark alice in wonderland/johnlock au. I was thinking of John as Alice (he could carry off the wtf is going on feel very well) and Moriarty as the Red Queen. But I was thinking of Sherlock more as the Mad Hatter, sort of a genius who has snapped. Sort of making deductions and rambling wildly. Also, I think Mycroft could pull off the Caterpillar well."
> 
> This is not what she had hoped for, but I hope it's still good enough!

_I met someone yesterday, and last night he appeared in my dreams. I don’t know what that means. My dreams are so awful, of roaring planes and mortar fire and the relentless sharp retorts repeating over and over and over, and I see people in my dreams, of course I do, isn’t that why they sent me to a therapist? Not that I would reveal the extent of it, but it’s starting to creep out of my control. I’m losing it. Going bonkers, Stamford would say. Saw him yesterday, too, and saw him in my dreams as a giant fat bird, grinning like a lunatic, perched on a ridiculous rock as his skin sloughed away from rot._

_But that man – Sherlock Holmes, he told me, after he sized me up and knew everything about me – that man, when he appeared, he wasn’t like the others. I don’t know what that means. Times like these I wish I had told my therapist, if only so she could interpret what his presence would mean. He wasn’t like the others; he was whole. In a way. Deranged, a bit, with a ridiculous top hat perched on top of his head. His scarf was made up of barbed wire, and he carried with him a chemists’ set with which he produced gold. One eye was bigger than the other, and bloodshot, and he trailed wailing shrieks and screams and cries behind him._

_I’m to meet him, later today._

_\- - -_

_I killed a man yesterday._

_Sherlock still appeared in my dreams last night, and when I woke up I could hear crazed laughter, a cacophony of voices, and then they all faded away. Every last one of them._

_I killed a man._

_I keep thinking that this partnership is for the best. He may not particularly enjoy having me around, but he wants me, and he… quiets my head. He has direct, precise orders, and a direct, precise routine, and he regularly smashes it to bits, and it should shake me, should throw me, I who have never stepped out of my routine, who keeps to the routine that keeps me from going mad and shooting the lot of the neighbors. But when he breaks it, it is… quieting._

_I don’t know how else to explain it. Perhaps I ought to bring it up to my therapist, talk to her. Put it in terms she can understand, talk about how the intensity and severity of my dreams lessen when I can hear the wailing of voices trailing behind the hatter that stalks my subconscious, and when I can hear the notes of his violin in my waking moments._

_…No, I think not. I still do not know why my dreams have cracks run through them, why the planes sound even closer, why pieces of the landscape get suspended in the air only to crash down and kill me as I walk through my dreams. I don’t think telling my therapist that I regularly dream of dying from debris would help my case any._

_\- - -_

_Sarah showed up in my dreams. I wonder what my subconscious thinks of her._

_No, I know what it thinks of her. I worry a bit why her death doesn’t bother me the way it should. With Sherlock giving the directives and my hand on the skinning knife…_

_The screams she makes in my dreams are lovely, though. They blend with the ethereal voices that surround Sherlock, and they all are in such exquisite pain I feel as if I am witnessing something holy._

_\- - -_

_I don’t dream of dying that much anymore._

_Killing, however, killing features strongly in my dreams. Harry’s torn open corpse, only it’s not Harry but a giant rabbit that looks a bit like her. A bottle in its hand, ears limp against the ground, maggots crawling through the chest cavity and rotted blood clogging the back of my throat._

_I hold the knife that kills her._

_Perhaps it’s just a reaction of the argument we had last week. Perhaps._

_I do stand at the window sometimes, aim my revolver out into the street. Sight on some random bastard’s head._

_Imagine what it would look like to see blood and bone spray. Such beautiful patterns. Murray was killed by a sniper’s shot right next to me like that. Simply gorgeous, his body dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, blood pooling around his nose and his missing eye. I killed a man like that myself._

_It would be so easy._

_\- - -_

_Sherlock walks my dreams and I can’t help but follow, even as he goes to the end of my dreams and off the edge of the world._

_I plummet after him in the darkness, and find us caught by a web. When I thrash, I get wrapped up, tighter and tighter, the pressure making something throb in my head, but Sherlock lies supine, staring up in rapture as a blood-drenched king descends from on high, eight eyes set close in the otherwise human face, two sets of spider legs erupting from the king’s back while red dots of lights surround his forehead like a crown._

_The sound of beeping, of those dreaded pips, I still could hear then when I woke up, and I realized I had my revolver in my hand, pointed at the door._

_I keep telling myself I will not sleep with it, and every night it, and Sherlock’s violin, brings me peace. I wonder what that says about me._

_\- - -_

_Sherlock makes my dreams so interesting. Before him, the dreams – and the world, but for the most part the two didn’t mix – were washed out, grey. The dreams were soaked with blood, echoing with machine gun fire, and the bodies that greeted me and interacted with me were nameless, faceless, even. Now, there are faces galore, and all of them dance attendance to the center of my dreamscape, that madcap hatter with dark curls and piercing blue eyes, Sherlock Holmes._

_Tonight, a new face joined the throng, a mysterious catlike smile on her face, striped with shadow and disappearing whenever I turn to look at her head-on. She drifts down the path, to the side but ahead of me, and if I keep her in the corner of my eye sometimes she coalesces, fully formed, into a naked woman, drenched in gore, each finger a blade that dripped blood, only the blood vanished into the mists before it ever fell on the path. I know that if I follow the path, I will find Sherlock, and I will also find that spider-king, and I know that she has already led Sherlock into that web._

_I should not follow her. In my dream, I know that she wishes me ill, she has already harmed Sherlock. She is deadly and dangerous._

_Of course, when has any of that ever stopped me?_

_\- - -_

_Hounds bay along the path. Each step squelches with blood, and I’m drenched in it. My revolver is in my hand and I don’t know why._

_That catlike grin drifts along to my side, and webbing grows thick on the tree._

_A crash sounded from outside, outside my dream, and I woke up._

_For a moment, I could still see the webs clinging to the walls of my room. Sherlock was not there – he rarely stayed throughout the night, even if he fell asleep after our lovemaking – and the flat was cool._

_I stood up, and it was as if my feet were sinking into mush, into an ooze that covered my feet up to the ankle._

_I cannot remember the last time my dreams intruded upon reality. This is not safe. I should fill the prescriptions given to me, see if they can help, even though they are mainly for the PTSD and not for the dreams._

_Scratch that, I really ought to tell my therapist that my delusions are becoming more corporeal._

_But she would take away the music I hear from Sherlock. Drugs would keep me from following my madman in a hat through the twisting dreams. Why should I risk giving this all up, for drugs that will slow me down? Now, when there is case after case and Sherlock grows more and more tense and winds up tighter and tighter each day?_

_I shouldn’t tell anyone. The hounds that I hear are faint echoes. The webs I see draped from the curtain rod and doorways will disappear if I ignore them long enough. I cannot leave Sherlock alone, not now._

_\- - -_

_These people are going to tear him apart. I see them take bites from his skin, in my dreams. I see my madcap hatter chewed to bits but still walking, that barbed-wire scarf digging into that pale throat, chunks of flesh missing and oozing blood and blackness. They will eat him up and I can’t fight them all. I can’t kill them all._

_In my dreams, I try to anyway._

_I woke up last night, revolver leveled at the doorway, to see Sherlock’s silhouette there. The wailing and screams never faded. He quiets my head but everything grows so much more intense around him…_

_He asked me if I would shoot, and I asked him if he wanted me to. He considered that a long moment, and then came to my bed. We fucked, then, he and I, the revolver pressed between our bellies, his arms and thighs pinning me down._

_Then he left._

_My dreams got no better. Always they surround Sherlock in my dreams, and they bite at his flesh, and he lies there in the center of that web with that ethereal grin hovering over him. I scream and scream, my shouts mingling with the hounds and the violin and the wails, and still he stares up at the sky, riveted by something I cannot see, as his body grows less and less and that smile floats above him, growing wider and wider and the eyes sharper and sharper—_

_I do not know how to protect him from this._

_\- - -_

_Mycroft tells me about assassins and gives me no way to defend him. He shows up in my dream, a fat slug puffing a pipe, the smoke creating the images of scaled wings rising up grotesquely from his back. This isn’t the first time Mycroft appeared like this, but this is the first time that he flew on wings of smoke like a wyrm of old, smelling of death and rot and dank caves._

_He left me, in the dream. He left me, and told me to leave the path that will take me to Sherlock’s side. I do not know what that means._

_\- - -_

_I failed._

_\- - -_

_ I did not fail _ _._

_\- - -_

_Sherlock can’t die. He can’t, if he’s alive in my dreams. Everyone dies, I know that, I understand that, I’ve done it to others countless times, but Sherlock hasn’t died in my dreams yet, he still visits me, and by god or the devil or whatever lies between I refuse to think he’s gone. I refuse to consider the option. I don’t need a miracle._

_ I’m going to bring him back _ _._

_\- - -_

_~~ HE WILL COME BACK TO ME. ~~ _

 

“Sir?”

A rustling noise, and then a negligent hand waved the secretary in.

“Sir, everything’s packed up. Would you like for me to take this box?”

“No, I find the read quite… interesting. Do have Anthea pack that away safely, of course.”

“Yes sir.”

Mycroft turned another page of John’s diary, the spidery scrawl hasty and vicious in places, underlined in others. Scratches marked out much of the intimacy that had initially been recorded – for the best, since Sherlock rarely became intimate without a material reason. Still, the scratches were made of passion, not anger or despair. Removed so that prying eyes would not see, then, not because John had learned the depths of manipulation and isolation.

Well.

At least now Mycroft understood why there were such _interesting_ murders happening in London. And it suited him to let the doctor continue in his quest. After all, Sherlock let loose on the world was a danger, and Mycroft had gotten very, very good at containing the dark destruction that was his younger brother. If John’s crimes could call Sherlock back to London…

…So much the better.

He closed the journal and stood up. His tea was cold; he pressed the intercom.

“Yes, sir?”

“Have this box taken, but leave the journal on my desk. And bring me another cup of tea – this one has gotten cold.”

“Yes, sir.”


End file.
